How does Labour solve the greatest crisis in its history? In this week’s Spectator, I interview party thinker and former Miliband policy chief Jon Cruddas about where his party goes next. Cruddas doesn’t think Jeremy Corbyn is Labour’s problem: he’s just the symptom of an identity crisis that the party would have suffered from whoever got elected leader.
The Dagenham MP’s response to this crisis is not, like some of his colleagues, to join the frontbench, but to set up a new group that he hopes will be the crucible for a new Labour ideas that win it the 2020 election, in the same way as Labour recovered from the 1992 election to win in 1997 as New Labour.
He thinks the party needs a new group because ‘a lot of the old internal factions, the internal architecture, seems to belong to a different era, really, be they Progress or Compass or the Fabians’. And so his group could replace those old groups, or one of them perhaps, and take account of the way the Labour membership has changed in recent years too.
He has invited MPs from all sides of the Parliamentary Labour Party, local government figures and activists from across the party too.
This isn’t just going to be New Labour rebranded, though: Cruddas is pretty damning of the way the Blair project ended up. My magazine interview with him includes his remark that the Blairites have ended up sounding like a ‘sect’, but he spent a good chunk of our conversation musing about their failure. Cruddas speaks like an academic (in a good way) and his quotes are lengthy. Here’s a longer section of his point on the failure of Blair to create a lasting legacy:
‘You can see why you get to the stage where one part of the party can be seen to be monopolising questions of ethics, principle, the soul of the party because the other part of the party had become soulless because it shrunk the best modern attempt to reconcile the ethics.
‘Why New Labour and Blair had such power is because it uniquely reconciled the ethics of socialism with modernity in terms of a quest for power and an analysis of what was happening across the globe.
‘But then you compare the Blair speech of ’94 which almost talked in parables about obligations to others, I am my brother’s keeper, he was talking about the Good Samaritan, he conjured up a notion of modern Britain through parables.
‘It’s really interesting and compare that to his last conference speech which literally had a sink or swim dystopian take on people’s thing in the modern world, it is really interesting and the distance between those speeches speaks of the emptying out of Blairism I would suggest.
‘But then if you define Blairism simply by what it was at the end you are unable to understand how you’d lost that grip with the people and in the party. So Blair was a very powerful carrier of those messages because he quite consciously extracted the Christian socialist heritage of the party and landed it within a modern analysis of economic and social modernisation actually.
‘It was brilliantly done and it was a really heavy duty modernisation project, intellectually, ideologically, organisationally, through the years run by an organisation that spanned right through to the soft left, the centre left of the party and Blairism is a sideshow now compared to what it was.’
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